The Community Development Programme (CDP) is a remote-area Work for the Dole scheme that principally affects Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The program is billed by the government as 'helping people find work, and allowing them to contribute to their communities and gain skills while looking for work.' But there is mounting evidence that CDP is creating significant hardship for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities, leading to increasing pressure for the scheme to be scrapped or radically overhauled.

Jon Altman has a disciplinary background in economics and anthropology. From 1983­-90 he was a postdoctoral fellow, research fellow and senior research fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change in the HC Coombs Building. From 1990-2010 he was Foundation Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) when it was a university centre and then a research professor there till 2015. Since 2001 he has also been an adjunct Professorial Fellow at the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods at Charles Darwin University in Darwin.